It is silly to say that miner's "profit tends to remain the same regardless of the price decline". If they were to initiate an attack on the real Bitcoin (Bitcoin Segwit- as decided by Social Consensus), then the public perception and confidence in cryptocurrencies will be shattered.
Everyone's not going to simply throw in the towel, eat the economic losses, and move to an alternative cryptocurrency (Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Satoshi- as decided by Social Consensus).
The whales' bags are worth next to nothing if no one is willing to buy them at decent prices. Miners and whales are smarter than this... they will not risk killing the good thing they have going. They are already well on their way to becoming the richest of the rich. They can do so by doing nothing, and letting this whole Bitxoin thing play out naturally.
Bitcoin has indeed forked numerous times. There have been at least two hard forks and numerous soft forks. A simple Google search will prove such, but this is a good place to start:
8th August 2010 - 92 billion BTC into existence
On 8th August 2010 bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik wrote what could be mildly described as the biggest understatement since Apollo 13 told Houston: Weve had a problem here.. The value out in this block is quite strange, he wrote on bitcointalk.org, referring to a block that had somehow contained 92 billion BTC, which is precisely 91,979,000,000 more bitcoin than is ever supposed to exist. CVE-2010-5139 (CVE meaning common vulnerability and exposures) was frighteningly simple and exploited to the point of farce by an unknown attacker. In technical language, the bug is known as a number overflow error.So instead of the system counting up 98, 99, 100, 101, for example, it broke at 99 and went to zero (or -100) instead of 100. In laymans terms, someone found a way to flood the code and create a ridiculously large amount of bitcoin in the process.
The fix was the bitcoin equivalent of dying in a video game and restarting from the last save point. The community simply hit undo, jumping back to the point in the blockchain before the hack occurred and starting anew from there; all of the transactions made after the bug was exploited but before the fix was implemented were effectively cancelled.
How serious was it? Bitcoins lead developer Wladimir Van Der Laan is pretty blunt about it, telling me: It was the worst problem ever.
Source1:
http://www.coindesk.com/9-biggest-screwups-bitcoin-history/Source2:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0 11/12 March 2013 - Chain Fork Information
What happened: A bitcoin miner running version 0.8.0 created a large block (at height 225,430) that is incompatible with earlier versions of Bitcoin. The result was a block chain fork, with miners, merchants and users running the new version of bitcoin accepting, and building on, that block, and miners, merchants and users running older versions of bitcoin rejecting it and creating their own block chain.
What is being done:Large mining pools running version 0.8.0 were asked to switch back to version 0.7, to create a single block chain compatible with all bitcoin software.
Questions & Answers
I'm not a miner or a merchant, what should I do?
Nothing. Your bitcoin software will switch to the correct chain automatically, no matter which version you are running.
Are my bitcoins safe?
Yes.
What will be done
The core developers have investigated what caused the old versions to reject the new blocks, and have released a 0.8.1 version that avoids creating blocks that are incompatible with older versions. A full post-mortem document has been published.
Source1:
https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-forkSource2:
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/3668/bitcoin-network-shaken-by-blockchain-fork/ I also found this list:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposures but i'm finding hard to identify the ones that had a hardfork / rollback...
I don't think anyone is arguing that mining is decentralized. It has been common knowledge in the community since at least 2013 that due to economies of scale ASICs bring, proof of work (and all other consensus algorithms for different reasons) tends toward centralization.
But the miners work for us. We are not slaves. This is the beauty of the free market. Whales and Miners are effectively bag holders. Their mined coins are worth nothing if no one is willing to buy them. Their transaction fees tend to 0 if no one wants to transact on their blockchain, and they are left with expensive paper weights. What you theorize is a suicide mission. They are smarter than that.
At the end of the day, the community owns Whales and Miners... It is not the other way around. You will come to realize this come mid November. Judging from the market, I guess yoy have already lost at least some money on this theory, but I hope you don't lose too much more money on this looney Bcash/Bitcoin Satoshi suicide mission.